Physically based Fresnel for both dielectric and metal materials. Unified index of refraction value for both reflection and transmission with dielectrics. An artist friendly metallic Fresnel based on Ole Gulbrandsen model using reflection color and edge tint to derive complex IOR.

The aweSurface.zip contains a readme for the shader and some basic shader presets that will apply AWE Surface to the existing materials. The contents of aweSurface DS App Folder Files.zip are the compiled Renderman shader code (.sdl) and supporting DS scripts to be placed within your DAZ Studio application folder (ie Program Files/DAZ 3D/DAZ Studio 4/..." Mustakettu's render script files are also included in this archive.

There's a simple example scene to the Google drive folder with the DAZ Material Ball loaded and an environment sphere with OMKHPark applied. All the surfaces in the scene except for the environment sphere have AWE Surface applied.

More info can be found in the readme.

For best results, render with the included mustakettu's 3delight render script. It's also a good way to see if your installation is successful. You should be able to see these in the renderer settings.

AWE Surface 1.0
AWE Surface is a new, robust, highly optimized, physically plausible shader for DAZ Studio and 3Delight employing physically based rendering (PBR) metalness / roughness workflow. Using a primarily uber shader approach, it can be used to render materials such as dielectrics, glass and metal.

For best results, render with the included mustakettu's 3delight render script. It's also a good way to see if your installation is successful. You should be able to see these in the renderer settings.

Cook Torrance have a massive performance impact when max diffuse depth of the material using it is set above 1. Set max diffuse depth to 1 for all surfaces using Cook Torrance BRDF to minimize the issue.

Removed clamp and extraneous code from coat/specular bsdf when using point/spot/distant lights.

Adjusted Russian roulette weights used with ray tracing. This produces less noticeable dimming of specular highlights and reflection for renders with high pixel samples (more than 4x4).

Adjusted coat visibility in reflections and refractions. Previously, coat layer will not be rendered on reflections/refractions of the coated object.

Added a displacement bounds multiplier to tweak displacement bounds. This can be adjusted to optimize displacement bounds usage.

Implemented additional importance sampling technique for diffuse. This results in up to 90% faster render times for diffuse surfaces.

The new importance sampling also takes into account irradiance samples. This results in up to 50% faster render times with more than 512 irradiance samples on top of the improvements from the new importance sampling optimization.

Added dynamic bias based on displacement strength to raytracing shadeops to account for displacements. Previously, GI will not be calculated correctly when displacements are used. With the added bias, GI will look the same with or without displacements.

Specular and Global Illumination Exposure can now be used to offset exposure beyond scene wide exposure from AWE Environment light.

The shader now uses DS internal dPds instead of calculating its own. This results in no more artifacts when anisotropy is used.

In the same folder, you can find mustakettu's RadiumAreaPT light shader, a new shadow catcher shader with support for path traced area lights (like RadiumAreaPT and AWE AreaPT), and new point/spot/distant lights.

My testing experiences show that with the shader, rendering with 3delight can be 4 to 6 times faster than iray photoreal (20 min compared to 2 hours), but with much, much less noise and zero fireflies. Unlike previous DAZ 3delight shaders, those render times are with full raytraced reflections and global illumination. Practically the same that you see in 3delight for Maya, 3DSMax, Katana or other renderers like Arnold, Renderman and Vray.

The shader is free, so you can make presets for it or even distribute the shader with for your stuff, be it a freebie, personal or commercial use.

Bias now takes into account values from displacement textures when displacement is enabled.

Corrected erroneous bias when transmission is enabled. Added Transmission Bias so users can do manual offsets when needed. Defaults to -1 (minus 1).

Transmission shadow now renders correctly. Previously, it will exhibit blocky artifacts with path traced area lights.

Tweaked Russian roulette weights for diffuse rays. The shader will now only scale down importance at ray depth higher than 3 (previously it was 1). With this change, diffuse effectively renders the same as using full weight at very high ray depth ( > 6 ). Performance is unaffected.

Subsurface filtered strength is now a percentage of actual subsurface strength value (with texture mask taken into account). Previously, this was separate and caused problems of uneven SSS strength across some surfaces.

Subsurface now will use 'usetopology' and 'smooth'. Together with other improvements, subsurface should be much less noisy.

Rendering with subsurface now produces the same result both in the built-in 3delight renderer and the 3delight standalone renderer (tested with the 3delight 12.5.9 build). As a side effect, rendering subsurface is slightly faster (around 5%).

Revised energy conservation scheme for subsurface and diffuse. The new code doesn't produce speckles even without clamping. As a result, diffuse input for subsurface is now unclamped.

Revised blackbody code. The new code should be more accurate than the previous one.

Reworked opacity code and optimizations. The new code simply blends between original values in the textures and filtered values depending on optimization level. Optimization to Russian roulette depending on opacity allows the shader to render opacity mapped surfaces with negligible hit on render times (even with the original values without any optimization).

Changed default Opacity Optimization to 0%

You can find the transfer script inside the file 'AWE Transfer Uber.zip'